I've noticed that I've been literally burning through data lately again, similar to what I noticed about a year ago, where data usage seems to be twice as much as what you think you're using, or more. Either it's a change in the compression scheme, something causing packet resends between here and the gateway, or a couple of other paranoid theories I've had for a while that might explain some external phantom usage: Basically it has to do with bittorrent like protocols, where someone from the network might be excessively pinging your public IP, forcing data usage. If someone else using the IP 'shared' files it's very possible that other(s) have that IP stored from a recent session and are trying to reconnect. Might be your bad luck that you were assigned that IP. Forcing a new dynamic IP assignment from a reboot should alleviate something like that, but hasn't really for the most part. Similarly, it could also be people probing known HN IP ranges with unblocked ports. Noticed this happens when spam levels tend to rise - basically unscrupulous people looking for ways to hack into unprotected servers to implant spam bots. Spam levels have been up and down erratic for a while now. I prefer to blame one of the sketchy iOS games my wife plays on her phone (Cascade?), although I think that's not really it.
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